Playwright Matt Schutz described his new play Windows as a dramedy about a woman trying “to reinvent herself from her girlfriend’s couch.” The play is furthermore for anyone who finds they must quickly determine “what the next chapter in their life is going to be,” after their whole life is up-ended, he added.
Running through Aug. 23 in the Hoover-Leppen Theatre at Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St., Windows is the first production in PrideArts’s 2026-27 season.
Windows centers on Olivia (Lucabella Sangin), a once-promising soccer player permanently sidelined by a leg injury. Olivia has never considered anything other than soccer, and she’s grieving at her girlfriend Natalie’s (Vinita Dixit) apartment as she traverses both emotional and logistical crossroads.
Natalie’s roommate Clay (River Ruiz) is at first exasperated by Olivia’s snark and poor housekeeping, but the two gradually bond as he too faces relationship and professional challenges. David Lipschultz and Ashley Kramer portray characters living in the apartment across the courtyard across the way, whom Olivia watches all day and invents her own stories for.
“We’re certainly grappling with some serious themes and some sad storylines,” Schutz explained. “But overall, it’s told with a spark of humor throughout.”
It’s the first full-length play that Schutz has had produced, and was inspired by his frustration job-hunting after graduating from Columbia College Chicago.
“I did the very famous thing of going to grad school, as many of us do,” he recalled. “As I was finishing up my grad program, I was struggling to get interviews. I did a pretty specific program in arts management, and I just couldn’t get interviews.”
Schutz’s script was developed through PrideArts’s QUEERY Playwrights Lab. Six scripts were chosen for potential production from 33 submissions; an audience helped choose Windows after watching performances of various scenes from the plays. Windows is directed by QUEERY Festival director Taylor Pasche.
The play is the first full-length play Schutz has had performed, and he described the production process as being full of “validation and excitement,” beginning with the first table-read of the script, then various design presentations.
He recalled, “I had never met [the show’s designers]. Maybe I’d seen their name on an email somewhere. They were going through their presentations with thoughts and ideas based on my play, my work, my words, without ever having met me. I just had this really rewarding, thankful moment.”
Schutz worked intermittently on Windows beginning in 2022, when he was still in graduate school—the production is probably mounting what is actually the 15th draft of his script, he said. He’s previously written shorter plays that he acted in himself, and he appreciated being more hands-off during Windows’s production.
Pasche and the cast are “incredible,” Schutz said. “I’ve felt completely confident in handing it off, and just being like, ‘Here are the words. What do you need from me?’”
He harbored aspirations of being a writer since a young age, and initially wanted to be a novelist. He was an English creative-writing major at the University of Iowa, but he soon discovered that he lacked the patience for novel-writing.
Schutz recalled, “So I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll switch to short stories. I’ll be a short story writer.’ Then I found out that there’s practically no market for short stories. So then I was just going through classes for my major, and there was a playwriting course that was offered, and so I signed up for it.”
The course ignited a passion for Schutz, who had only ever done a bit of acting in high school: “I was not a theater kid. I was a band kid.”
Playwriting entailed “everything that I was looking for in the writing process,” Schutz said. He preferred the collaborative nature of theater as opposed to the isolation inherent in writing prose. “It’s like the things you think are being said back to you so you can kind of argue with yourself in a way, which is really cool,” he said.
Schutz declared theater as his second major and came to the Windy City upon graduation.
“There’s kind of the big three cities—LA, New York and Chicago—for theater kids,” he said. “I very specifically chose Chicago. The new work thing here is incredible. We have multiple theaters across the city who are dedicated specifically to the curation of new work. … I feel like Chicago, in comparison to a lot of the other cities that I looked at, had a real hunger for new work in a way that selfishly I loved because I’m a playwright.”
He still works as an actor occasionally, and, thanks to his recently being selected for a residency with the playwright incubator program Playground-Chicago, is beginning work on a play called Into the Sea, which will be part of what he called a triptych of thematically-linked plays. Schutz has written the first two: Into the Sky is about gay astronauts, and the second, Into the Forest, is about gay ghosts. Into the Sea focuses on gay pirates.
He likes to include what he calls “casual queerness” in his work. He doesn’t include LGBTQ+ tropes such as coming out or characters targeted for violence.
“I write a lot of characters who are members of the LGBTQIA community in a variety of aspects,” Schutz said. “But very purposefully, I do not set their queerness as the conflict of the scene. … They’re just doing things. They’re going to the grocery store. They’re dealing with flat tires. They’re dealing with relationship problems—but it’s not because they are queer.”
Windows runs through Aug. 23 at Hoover-Leppen Theatre at Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St. See here for ticket information.